Just wanted to say hey and all to everyone here from a lurker. My school has a RP machine and it's pretty awesome, and I was happy to see there was an online community for an open source RP so easily availible!
Anyways I've been working for the past few days on what I would hope to be a good RepStrap machine. I've been designing it in CAD and hopefully it will be done soon. I have the X and Y axes done, and unfortunately the program I am using (being free
) limits my assembly parts to like 12 or something tiny. Anyways that is enough to do the main assembly, and the parts are really simple to make. I decided to go with a much smaller version than most people have made. It's going to only have an extrusion area of something like 6x4", but I figure who makes anything bigger than that anyways? I have a machine shop (blasted lathe and mill are BOTH down at the moment...) so making parts should be simple enough. The thing is I am trying to make this out of very cheap stuff, being a college student I, by definition, have no money. So plastic cutting boards it is! Anyways if it goes off well I might could just start selling some of the parts to those non-mechanically inclined folks out there.
So at this moment, what exactly is the biggest hurdle? Software? Hardware? Firmware? I am immensely better with hardware than anything else, followed by some software and barely any familiarity with firmware beyond it's spelling